After outcry, donors rush to wipe out R.I. school system's lunch debt

By Mark Reynolds mreynold@providencejournal.com

Friday

May 10, 2019 at 11:52 AMMay 10, 2019 at 11:55 AM

The Chobani yogurt company donated almost $50,000 on Thursday to pay off the lunch bills of Warwick, R.I., schoolchildren in a philanthropic effort to protect them from a threatened policy that had drawn national media coverage and fueled concerns about “lunch shaming” in the city’s schools.

By the time Chobani made the donation, a separate fundraising effort was snowballing. And the school system had already changed course, stepping away from a policy that had been loudly derided for days by parents and drawn interest from two celebrities, Alec Baldwin and Michael Moore.

The district will not follow through on its earlier plan to deny hot lunches and food choices to children who owe money, serving only sunflower butter and jelly sandwiches to students in arrears, said the chairwoman of Warwick’s school committee, Karen Bachus.

Her comments, both late Wednesday and again on Thursday, represented a dramatic change in stance on the issue after several days of spiraling complaints from parents and media coverage that had generated articles in The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and reports on CNN and network news broadcasts.

Critics, who are sensitive to what they call “lunch shaming,” say that policies like the one threatened in Warwick penalize schoolchildren — and also expose them to potential feelings of shame. This is unfair, they say, because the children are not responsible for their parents’ financial situation.

“The school district in Warwick, Rhode Island, has decided to publicly humiliate and punish schoolchildren who have fallen behind in paying the district for their lunch,” says a comment posted on Moore’s Instagram page on Wednesday.

“How much do we Americans hate children?,” says the post. “It’s not just that we force millions of them to live in poverty, or be denied adequate health care, or are leaving them a world without polar ice caps. We also like to shame them and starve them in the lunchroom.”

How much do we Americans hate children? It’s not just that we force millions of them to live in poverty, or be denied adequate health care, or are leaving them a world without polar ice caps. We also like to shame them and starve them in the lunchroom:https://t.co/JAVXsZFzyE

— Michael Moore (@MMFlint)May 8, 2019

Bachus said she had learned more about the pending policy in recent days and it was clear that, to her dismay, it involved removing food from students’ trays, throwing it out and replacing it with the sandwiches.

“I will not condone shaming children or wasting food in order to try to make parents pay their lunch bills,” she said Thursday.

Meanwhile, a major reason for the emergence of the threatened policy in the first place — the expense — appeared to be going away.

Warwick Mayor Joseph J. Solomon confirmed that his office had received a donation of $47,650 from Chobani.

Meanwhile, Angelica Penta, a 34-year-old woman said that an online fundraising effort, the “Full Belly Fund,” had drawn at least $30,000, not including a Florida donor’s promise of $10,000.

Her fundraising efforts and concerns about “lunch shaming” date back to 2018 and she asserts that Warwick school administrators rebuffed a donation of $4,000.

Warwick School Superintendent Philip Thornton said legal concerns had hindered the district’s receipt of donations and that lawyers are working on a remedy that will allow the system to receive money and eliminate the debt.

In a news release, Hamdi Ulukaya, the founder and CEO of Chobani, said that the company “is trying to bring attention to the national crisis of food insecurity among students...”

“Chobani is also pledging to donate cups and bottles of our Chobani® Greek Yogurt to the community in Warwick,” he said.

Ulukaya said that “access to naturally nutritious and delicious food should be a right, not a privilege for every child.”

As of May 3, 1,653 children had owed money for lunches, according to Bachus. The total amount owed to the district for lunches had reached $77,000, she said.

Earlier in the week, Bachus had emphasized that the students who cannot pay for hot lunch due to economic hardship are eligible for assistance if their parents apply for it.

Since then, a fresh study has suggested that the district “allow the students their choice of lunch regardless of their account status.”

Bachus said she remains concerned about the possibility that donors fundamentally misunderstand the essence of the unpaid lunch bills — and that Warwick’s schoolchildren might learn the wrong lesson from all the philanthropy.

Bachus said most of the problem involves children from families who can afford to pay the lunch bills but are not paying. She said she is aware of one student who was in arrears recently in the aftermath of a European ski vacation.

Other children, who might be poorer, are in arrears because their parents haven’t filed the paperwork to take advantage of assistance that would pay for lunch, she said.

“What happens to responsibility?” she asked. “When you have children, you are responsible for them.”

Mayor Solomon opted to focus on the positive aspects of the episode, including what he described as a “public private business partnership to help the community.”

“It just continues to give us hope in the world,” he said, “that there are a lot of good people out there. A lot of people doing good things...We hear in the news about negative things but it’s refreshing to have positive things like this occurring.”

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